Quote:
Originally Posted by jhowell
I think it is interesting to consider the number of books read over the lifetime of an e-reader device. For my prior devices it was enough to add far less than $1 to the cost of each book read, so I feel that I have gotten my money's worth out of those purchases. It is too soon to tell if that will be the case for my current, more expensive, device.
But I don't think that it is or ever will be an important ecological question. As I see it e-book readers are a declining niche and the number of e-books read on non-dedicated devices, such as smart phones and tablets, is likely much greater. The relative environmental impact for those multi-purpose devices is far harder to evaluate.
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I agree that it is unlikely that the ecological impact of dedicated e-readers will every be anything other than negligible. I suspect that almost all non-dedicated devices that are used for reading would have been bought anyway. (Although there might be a lot of tablets bought exclusively or primarily for reading PDFs.) It seems to me that book reading on generic devices bought without consideration of book reading instead of buying paper books could be a big ecological win unless the ecological impact of paper books is insignificant.